“Maleducados/Ill-mannered” during the #A28 political campaign on Twitter
A metapragmatic study of impoliteness labels and comments in Spanish
Patricia Bou-Franch | IULMA, Universitat de València
This paper approaches the study of conflict through an examination of Spanish metapragmatic labels and comments of
impoliteness on Twitter. The aim is twofold. It first aims to confirm the attributed importance of the label
maleducado
/ill-mannered in the specific context of Twitter and of digital discourse more generally, on quantitative and
comparative grounds; then, it investigates this label, and the metapragmatic comments where it occurred, in a contextualized corpus of
tweets compiled during the political campaign of Spain’s General Elections of April 28, 2019. The study draws from five ad
hoc corpora specifically compiled from Twitter, and a general corpus of Spanish digital discourse provided by Sketch Engine. The
analysis adopts a corpus-based metapragmatic approach, which combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings revealed that
maleducado
was the most frequent metapragmatic label under scrutiny in the Twitter corpora and motivated the subsequent
study of lay conceptualizations of this term.
Keywords: conflict, metapragmatics, impoliteness, Spanish, Twitter
Published online: 26 November 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00048.bou
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00048.bou
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